Ice Ghosts

by Paul Watson

  14

  Fast Ice

  Around the time that David Woodman was working on Skull Island, Louie Kamookak began to sense that his own tortuous search was drawing close to Franklin’s grave. He could feel it in his heart. From Inuit descriptions and his amateur detective’s deductions, he imagined what a burial vault built of stone and camouflaged among the slabs and shards of rock that cover King William Island would look like. Kamookak described it to a local artist, who made a sketch so the historian could visualize Franklin’s burial place without the heavy weight of it constantly on his mind. He could also show it to trusted people to see if it tripped anything in their memories. In 2004, Sir John’s resting place suddenly seemed within reach.

  “I thought I had found some stuff,” he said, cautious with clipped words. “And I got pretty sick. Had to have heart surgery. Ten percent chance of survival. Some people told me it’s bad luck. Getting too close to Franklin.”

  Kamookak had to be flown some twelve hundred miles southwest to Edmonton, Alberta, to reach the closest hospital that had the skilled doctors and equipment with any chance to save his life. He was on the operating table about nine hours while cardiac surgeons replaced one heart valve and repaired another. He likes to think the new valve came from a polar bear, which brings a big, broad smile to his face.

  “I was in the hospital for four months,” he said. “I barely made it through.”

  Elders and others who knew of the qalunaaq curse on King William Island thought Kamookak should heed fair warning. Instead, when he was back on his feet, he tried to pick up the trail of Franklin’s tomb again. So many skeletons of Sir John’s men have been found since the middle of the nineteenth century, including by Kamookak’s own grandfather, that he couldn’t ignore descriptions of two unique burial places. The other men were either buried in very shallow graves, or left to decompose where they dropped. If only one or two of the dead were worthy of musket salutes, and tombs made from carefully laid stones, one with a very large wooden cross built to last, Kamookak needed to know why. Even if it killed him.

  THREE YEARS AFTER his near-death experience, the first in a quickening series of serendipitous turns gave new life to the hunt for Erebus and Terror. In what ordinarily would be an unremarkable shift in the civil service, marine biologist Martin Bergmann took charge of the Polar Continental Shelf Program in the hamlet of Resolute, on Cornwallis Island’s south coast, overlooking a High Arctic leg of Northwest Passage. Inuit know it as Qausuittuq, the “Place with No Dawn,” because, from late April to mid-August, the sun never sets. From late November to mid-January, the sun doesn’t rise. A biologist by training, Bergmann was now responsible for a logistics hub that supported scientists from around the world doing research in the High Arctic.

  When a NASA-led research effort needed to test equipment such as robots, mining technologies, extravehicular activities, and other essentials for putting humans on Mars, its Haughton-Mars Project relied on Bergmann and his staff for complex logistics support. The harsh environment and rugged geology in the poorly mapped polar desert on Devon Island, about 165 miles north of Resolute, was an ideal stand-in for exploration of the red planet. In 2006, the logistics center supported a team of American paleontologists that discovered a fossilized “missing link” in the evolution of sea creatures to land animals buried in a river delta on Ellesmere Island. Tiktaalik roseae, which lived some 375 million years ago, was covered with bony scales, had jaws like a crocodile’s, but swam with front fins that were developing the elbows and wrists of arms. When the scientists, led by Edward Daeschler and Neil Shubin, discovered the fossil of another lobe-finned species on Ellesmere, they wanted to honor Bergmann for providing “essential support to a wide community of Arctic researchers” and for making the Arctic relevant to a global audience. So they named the toothy Devonian predator Holoptychius bergmanni.

  The paleontologists were celebrating a mission that Bergmann shared with another scientist and longtime friend, oceanographer Eddy Carmack, who headed the federal Three Oceans Program studying Canada’s Pacific, Atlantic, and Arctic waters from top to bottom. Each summer, marine scientists crisscrossed the Arctic Archipelago on two icebreakers, taking water samples, collecting mud from the sea bottom, capturing microscopic marine life, and conducting other long-term studies to see more clearly how climate change is affecting the planet’s most rapidly warming region. When beds opened up for a few days between crew changes, Carmack and Bergmann filled them with up to twenty VIPs, leading research scientists, businesspeople, government policymakers, experts in Inuit culture, and others on what were called Philosopher Cruises. The guests hosted seminars on whatever topic they thought important while absorbing the Arctic messages that Carmack and Bergmann were determined to spread. Singing Stan Rogers’s ballad Northwest Passage, with its lyrical longing “to find the hand of Franklin reaching for the Beaufort Sea,” was a required ritual.

  It was part of a plan Bergmann and Carmack discussed Sunday nights, separated by more than a thousand miles of prairie and western mountains, when they each poured a glass of Scotch, got on the phone, and schemed about how to advance their Arctic agenda. They talked about how to encourage responsible northern development based on solid science, not hypotheticals, political slogans, or outright myths. The best way to achieve that, they decided, was to get more people up to the Arctic to experience a precious place for themselves, whether they were tourists, businesspeople, or scientists. Master of the elevator pitch, Bergmann never stopped plotting to win over influential people he thought would advance the cause. If that meant attending a dull function just to chat up a diplomat on his list, Bergmann jumped at the chance. If a research scientist was important to the plan, Bergmann coaxed her into the fold. He eventually built a core group of around twenty, including young people Bergmann mentored, knowing they were the ones who would carry on the work long after he was gone.

  In a German airport lounge, Bergmann spotted a new target. Peter Mansbridge knew the Arctic, but not the bureaucrat who was becoming an evangelist for the North. The national news anchor for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) has been called Canada’s Cronkite. When Disney needed a convincing voice for the animated moose news anchor in its hit film Zootopia, Mansbridge got the call. He became Peter Moosebridge. Long before he was a name, Mansbridge was based in Churchill, Manitoba, a port that links Hudson Bay to the transnational railroad. Kuugjuaq to the Inuit, Churchill is best known for watching polar bears. They developed the habit of wandering into town to feast on a garbage-dump buffet before it was shut down. Mansbridge began his CBC career there and made frequent reporting trips higher into the Arctic.

  In the spring of 2006, Mansbridge was between flights, heading home from interviewing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and broadcasting live from Jerusalem, when the journalist sat in what seemed a quiet spot in Air Canada’s lounge at Frankfurt Airport. He was jet-lagged, all talked out, and hoping the world would leave him alone. Out of the corner of his eye, Mansbridge spotted a bear of a man striding purposefully toward him. He had that look on his face, the one where ordinary folk recognize a celebrity and zero in.

  “Oh, boy,” the anchor thought, bracing himself.

  “Peter Mansbridge!” the interloper blurted.

  “That’s right.”

  Bergmann launched into what was by then a well-honed pitch.

  “This is the story you need to be covering, Peter: You need to be talking about the Arctic and climate change.”

  Bergmann lured Mansbridge north again with the promise that he would be the first to broadcast the national news live from the Northwest Passage. Which wasn’t easy.

  At Resolute, the farthest point north on their icebreaker voyage, the CBC crew was roughly a thousand miles from the North Pole. To keep their satellite signal from dropping out, technicians had to move the dish by hand, nudging it tiny fractions of an inch as the ship moved. Push too hard, or not enough, and viewers across the country would be shouting at th
eir screens. Instead, they were part of a historic first. No one had ever watched a live broadcast from as far north in Canada’s Arctic. It pulled in a good audience, especially for the summer doldrums of TV news, and allowed people to see that climate change was not a fuzzy theoretical threat in the Arctic.

  “In areas where we’d normally be still crunching through ice at the end of July, it was wide open,” Mansbridge recalled. “We were basically sunning on the deck. It was unbelievable.”

  A new leader had just taken power in Canada, and he had his own designs on the Arctic, including a strategy to market his broader conservative agenda through heroic tales of the North. Prime Minister Stephen Harper immediately began to ratchet the bolts on what quickly became an excruciatingly tight information-management machine. He set it to work gagging federal scientists, especially experts warning of human-driven climate change, and anyone else who might think of challenging his plans. Harper wanted the Arctic to be the shiny white wrapping around his government’s darker policies. Those included loosening regulations on private enterprise, weakening environmental controls over resource development, and taking a more bellicose stand on Canada’s ownership claim not just over the Arctic Archipelago but also over the seabed all the way to the North Pole. The territory is thought to hold a bonanza of fossil-fuel and mineral resources. In an extremely sensitive environment battered by storms, they would be extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, to extract without causing severe damage that could ripple around the world. But with scientists predicting the Arctic could be ice-free in summertime within a generation, pressure was building to open up the High Arctic to more fishing trawlers, shippers, and resource companies.

  Just as John Barrow had done in the mid-nineteenth century, Harper saw power in taming the Arctic. He had just the plan to join two eras of Arctic promise in voters’ minds. A new, more ambitious search for the lost ships of the Franklin Expedition became a central part of his strategy to mold public opinion. As a propaganda piece, the Northwest Passage was just as good at stirring Canadian nationalism in the twenty-first century as it was with British imperial pride in the nineteenth. Environment Minister John Baird announced the revived Franklin hunt in the summer of 2008, a hard sell in the depths of the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. Baird pitched the projected $75,000 cost as an affordable adventure with what he called “the allure of an Indiana Jones mystery.” The prototype had been set in 1997: A Coast Guard icebreaker would be a floating base, but several agencies would cooperate in the search. The government committed to three summers of searching, led by Robert Grenier’s underwater archaeology unit at Parks Canada. After more than a century and a half of failed attempts to find Erebus and Terror, Kamookak might make the difference this time, Baird suggested.

  “His research has provided incredibly valuable insight that will help contribute greatly to this search,” the environment minister said, predicting success within two years.

  Douglas Stenton, Nunavut’s heritage director, also praised Kamookak’s groundwork, which helped narrow the search blocks to two main areas: where the ships were first abandoned at the top of Victoria Strait, and in eastern Queen Maud Gulf. Staged from the icebreaker CCGS Sir Wilfrid Laurier, the first season of Stephen Harper’s vaunted shipwreck search had a sputtering start. Search teams had to stand down when higher priorities, such as looking for lost and stranded Inuit hunters or assisting ships stuck in ice, bumped them down the tasking list. The scheduled six-week focus on eastern Queen Maud Gulf was quietly cut to just over half a week of scanning the seabed for Erebus and Terror. Bathymetric mapping of the zone where the ships were abandoned in 1848, which archaeologists sometimes call the point of desertion, showed a depth of more than 410 feet. Heavy ice is also common in the area in summer. Finding a wreck there was going to be tough. Without knowing it, that first expedition got very close to hitting pay dirt north of O’Reilly Island.

  Nothing happened the second year because Parks Canada couldn’t book time on a Coast Guard or a military vessel. Harper was pressing for faster progress on a much bigger priority: a detailed study of the continental shelf to back up Canada’s claim over a vast stretch of the Arctic seabed, straight up to the North Pole. Moscow had upped the ante on Arctic territorial claims by sending two submarines more than two miles beneath the ice-covered pole to plant a titanium Russian flag on the Lomonosov Ridge. This undersea mountain range, which bisects the Arctic for nearly twelve hundred miles, holds reserves of oil and natural gas worth billions of dollars. If drilling ever happens, scientists say it would only accelerate catastrophic climate change.

  _______

  TOM ZAGON has the round, smoothly bald head of a pro wrestler or a clean-and-jerk weight lifter. But the physical forces he knows intimately are the pressures of ice against the hulls of ship and the power that wind and ocean current exert on floes. In the nineteenth century, William Scoresby wowed the scientific world with exquisite drawings of ice crystals, works of art that revealed myriad microscopic forms that he used to explain, among other things, why cirrus clouds are sometimes iridescent. When Zagon looks at ice, he doesn’t see a solid object, but rather a dynamic process that can move as fast as a flash frost spreading across a windowpane—albeit on a vastly bigger scale. In six months, from the height of summer to the depths of winter, the Northern Hemisphere’s ice cover can grow by some 3.8 million square miles.

  “If you do it as a back of the envelope calculation, sometimes the rate of freeze up is around one square kilometer (or just under half a square mile) a second,” Zagon explained.

  At that speed, ice is like a charging beast that can easily pounce on unsuspecting mariners. Zagon has fallen prey himself. In November 1995, he was ice adviser aboard M/V Arctic, a 725-foot ship owned by Canada’s Fednav Group, which carried Arctic oil and ore through the Northwest Passage. The ship was beset for four days until an icebreaker freed her. If anyone could imagine how Erebus’s ice master James Reid must have felt when Franklin’s ships ran into similar trouble at the north end of Victoria Strait, it was Zagon during those long days in winter darkness on the Arctic.

  “You are the most hated man on the ship,” he said. “The captain realizes it’s not your fault. But everybody else says it is your fault.”

  Reid, Erebus’s ice master, relied largely on gut instinct and hard-won experience to advise Franklin as he circumnavigated nearby Cornwallis Island a year before getting stuck. Sir John passed within sight of the future mine to the northwest. Zagon helped the Arctic reach its destination by studying images beamed down from a chartered Challenger jet that flew in front of the ship once or twice a day, reporting regular updates on ice conditions as the winter freeze-up began to close the passage. The bill was tens of thousands of dollars a day. Four years later, when Zagon’s mind turned to the Franklin Expedition, he realized the sea ice must have been very light in the late summer of 1845 for two Royal Navy barques to make it around Cornwallis Island so late in the season. It was one of several eureka moments that drew him into the search.

  “Why can’t ice information be used to understand what happened to Franklin’s voyage, or any voyage for that matter?” he wondered.

  Zagon stored the thought in the back of his mind until the fall of 2009. He was at work on a new job as an analyst at the Canadian Ice Service, the federal agency that provides navigators the Daily Ice Chart, detailing sea-ice conditions by region. He was alone on the evening shift in downtown Ottawa, waiting for the latest images to come down from an orbiting satellite equipped with synthetic aperture radar that can see through the thickest clouds. Banks of monitors on several desks glowed in the half-light of the operational area, more than a thousand square feet of fourth-floor office space where weather data is integrated with satellite imagery into ice charts. He had made a mental note to keep an eye on a TV program coming up. Peter Mansbridge was interviewing Robert Grenier, head of the marine archaeology unit, on his half-hour show Mansbridge One on One. The subject wa
s the lost Franklin Expedition, which first had caught Zagon’s interest six years earlier as a geography major doing fieldwork at an ice camp in Barrow Strait. He had packed classics of the Franklin genre for off-hours reading. When the opening credits rolled on the Ice Service’s big-screen TV, Zagon turned up the volume.

  Grenier began talking about the importance of Inuit stories, and how outsiders have trouble interpreting that oral history in time and space. He mentioned Louie Kamookak’s research, and islands Inuit call “the fingers,” and how the Inuk historian showed they must be far south of where Erebus and Terror were abandoned because he traced the nineteenth-century sources to their home territory.

  “White men like us cannot understand this,” Grenier told Mansbridge. “I think what’s fascinating in this expedition, this project, is that we link archaeological research with this oral history tradition.”

  He showed a piece of the copper sheeting that had been found in eastern Queen Maud Gulf and said it would have been relatively easy for someone using primitive tools to remove it from the hull of a Royal Navy ship. That person could have carried it an unknown distance, so the copper only hinted that a shipwreck might be nearby.

  “If you find them—and I think, in your mind, you’ve got a pretty good idea where you think at least one of them may be on the bottom—what kind of shape would it be in after 160 years?” Mansbridge asked.

  “It’s a ship that would have sunk in fresh ice, according to the Inuit testimony, indicating that it’s not a place where the ice crush accumulates, like we see when a river freezes up in the spring. It could be a ship very well preserved, that one.”

  Ice was Zagon’s business. Without a detailed understanding of its peculiar habits, he figured, accurately diagnosing problems like lost ships in Arctic seas was impossible. He thought about what Grenier was saying and sensed that the archaeologist was out of his depth. The instant the thought crossed Zagon’s mind, a desktop machine began to whir, slowly spitting out one of about twenty fresh satellite images produced each day for different parts of Canada’s Arctic.